Founded in 1999<\/a>\u00a0as the American Education Reform Council, and long funded by billionaire and top Republican Party donor Betsy DeVos, the since-renamed American Federation for Children pursues policies that redirect public education funding to parents to spend how they see fit. \u201cWe believe choice, innovation and entrepreneurism will revolutionize an antiquated K-12 system into a 21st century mode,\u201d states the website<\/a> for the lobby\u2019s 501(c)(3) partner,\u00a0the American Federation for Children Growth Fund, which sponsors the videos. DeVos was the group\u2019s chair when she was tapped in 2016 to serve as secretary of education under President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n The news broadcasts are mostly cheerful and positive, focused on students who overcome long odds, transformative educators, and \u201cinspiring schools.\u201d Ed Newsfeed segments have featured organizations, apps, schools, and services that have political and\/or financial connections to both the American Federation for Children and the DeVos family. Such relationships are not disclosed in the videos, which are marketed as straight news clips.<\/p>\n Multiple stories produced over the last year feature officials from K12 Inc., a publicly traded company founded in 2000 and the nation\u2019s largest supplier of management services and curriculum for virtual charter schools. Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick were early investors in K12 Inc., and the company has sponsored<\/a> the American Federation for Children\u2019s annual policy conferences. One segment, produced in late November 2020, touts the growth in student enrollment at K12 schools during the pandemic. The video features Kevin Chavous, who the producers identify as the president of academics, policy, and schools at K12 Inc.<\/p>\n \u201cCovid has been, I think, in many ways an opportunity to excite what is possible in education,\u201d Chavous says. \u201cBut it\u2019s also been a challenge because for a lot of families who have really trusted the public school system to educate their children, they now have to be more involved, and we try to take that load off with the way we offer our educational support.\u201d The clip makes no mention that Chavous also sits on the American Federation for Children\u2019s board<\/a>. In its recommended script, Ed Newsfeed encourages stations to tell viewers how to learn more about K12 Inc.\u2019s offerings. Another segment produced in late January, titled \u201cHow Covid has Changed U.S. Education,\u201d features Jeanna Pignatiello, K12 Inc.\u2019s senior\u00a0vice president and chief academic officer.<\/p>\n Emily Riordan, a spokesperson for the company (which renamed<\/a> itself “Stride” in November but is retaining the K12 brand<\/a>) told The Intercept that \u201cwe have responded to [Ed Newsfeed\u2019s] inquiries for stories about Stride K12-powered schools and online learning as we do for any other news organization or outlet, connecting them with enrolled families, teachers and school leaders, and Stride executives for interviews as appropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n Ed Newsfeed stories also featured Connections Academy, another for-profit virtual charter school that has donated to<\/a>\u00a0the American Federation for Children. \u201cEd Newsfeed takes a closer look at the world of online learning\u00a0and why it is successfully allowing\u00a0students to\u00a0be in charge of when and how they learn,\u201d says the group\u2019s fake anchor in one such 2019 segment, highlighting a student named Tyler enrolled in a virtual Connections Academy school. \u201cAnd while there isn\u2019t a brick-and-mortar building for Tyler to go to, online schools offer plenty of support. \u2026 Online instructors also say teaching kids virtually does away with the distractions that come with a typical classroom setting.\u201d<\/p>\n Many segments are seemingly apolitical and feel-good, spotlighting things like successful tutoring programs, new research on early autism, or a local barber who gives back-to-school haircuts. But many more clips feature schools, programs, and leaders affiliated with the school choice movement. In October 2019, Ed Newsfeed produced a two-part program on homeschooling, an advocacy priority of the national lobbying group. \u201cHomeschooling puts the curriculum completely in the parents hands,\u201d reads the suggested script. \u201cFind out why some say they’ve chosen homeschooling, how these clever and creative parents approach it, and the rewards.\u201d<\/p>\n The Intercept reached out to several television stations that it could identify as having run Ed Newsfeed stories, including KPVM and KLAS-TV in Nevada, KTVK in Arizona, and Fox34 (KJTV) in Texas. No representative returned request for comment.<\/p>\n Blanks Jr. confirmed that \u201cthere are no requirements for TV news stations as far as attributing the content to Ed Newsfeed\u201d and described the program as a \u201cfree service, run by a network of seasoned broadcast professionals, [and] offered to stations to be able to use video and interviews in any manner they see fit.\u201d Pointing to budget cuts in the struggling news industry, he added: \u201cThe majority of news stations do not have an education reporter, so the goal is to help them bring innovative education stories, as well as heart-warming people stories, tied to education topics to their viewers.\u201d<\/p>\n The main page of the Ed Newsfeed site.<\/p>\n \nScreenshot: The Intercept<\/p><\/div>\n Corporations and even<\/u>\u00a0U.S. government entities have been producing deceptive audiovisual content designed to look like real news broadcasts since at least the early 1990s. In 1992, a TV Guide cover story titled \u201cFake News\u201d<\/a> admonished the media and PR industry\u2019s practice of using so-called video news releases, or VNRs. The journalist, David Lieberman, warned that media outlets risked ruining their credibility with viewers if they did not label the footage clearly as the public relations content it is.<\/p>\n A front-page New York Times expos\u00e9<\/a> in 2005 detailed the George W. Bush administration\u2019s penchant for producing hundreds of fake news segments for television stations. At least 20 federal agencies, including the State Department, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Defense Department, produced pre-packaged content ready to air, narrated by \u201creporters\u201d who were actually former journalists now working full time in public relations. While companies and government agencies told news stations they were free to edit or choose which parts of the segment or script they\u2019d like to use, the stations often aired the footage and script in their original form.<\/p>\n Jon Stauber, the founder of the progressive watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, told Democracy Now!<\/a>\u00a0that the New York Times\u2019s 2005 report marked the first mainstream media expos\u00e9 of the \u201cbillion dollar sub-industry of the P.R. industry\u201d that he had been tracking for over a decade.<\/p>\n \u201cFirst of all, we’re talking about fake news,\u201d Stauber said in the interview, years before the term would become a household slogan popularized by Trump. \u201cAnd what this is, actually, is propaganda, because these are not news stories. They look like news stories, but they have a bias in favor of a political program or an ideology or a product. And the networks and stations that air these, and we’re talking about thousands of these produced a year, are engaging simply in plagiarism and fraud, fraud perpetrated on their viewers.\u201d<\/p>\n Allison Perlman, a historian of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, told The Intercept that prior to the 1980s, broadcast stations\u00a0had much greater concern about providing reputable news coverage to their communities. \u201cThere were public interest obligations when you were up for [broadcast] license renewal, and there was also a sense at the national level that high-quality journalism was good branding for stations and networks,\u201d Perlman said. That started to change when the Federal Communications Commission began deregulating broadcasting in 1981<\/a>\u00a0and as major broadcast networks were bought out by companies less committed to producing original journalism.<\/p>\n \u201cThe local stations still typically air local news in the evenings, but it\u2019s really expensive to produce that content, and I\u2019d imagine many would welcome some free stories,\u201d Perlman said. \u201cThe FCC does have news distortion rules, but those have not been enforced.\u201d<\/p>\n The Ed Newsfeed project works to obfuscate its ties to the school privatization lobbying group, perhaps to make laundering content easier. The vast majority of news segments are narrated by a \u201creporter\u201d named Kim Martinez, a former TV news anchor who is now a spokesperson for the American Federation for Children\u2019s Arizona chapter. Nowhere on the script segments or website does Ed Newsfeed identify Martinez as a spokesperson. Neither Martinez nor Margaret Beardsley, an executive producer for Ed Newsfeed who is also an Emmy Award-winning former TV news producer, returned The Intercept\u2019s requests for comment.<\/p>\n Blanks Jr., of the American Federation for Children, told The Intercept that Ed Newsfeed was launched in response to the overall dearth of education coverage. \u201cSo our team had the vision of providing a service to the industry given AFC Growth Fund’s network of relationships in K-12 education across the country,\u201d he said in an email. Asked about conflicts of interest and financial disclosures, Blanks Jr. said, \u201cEd Newsfeed is not paid for our coverage by any of the schools, programs, or educators featured in the pieces so there are no sponsorship attributions.\u201d He declined to provide details on the number of stations that have aired their video press releases.<\/p>\n The group\u2019s goal, Blanks Jr. said, is for coverage \u201cto be timely, positive, and helpful\u201d and to produce stories covering \u201call types of intriguing and uplifting K-12 schools and individuals \u2026 with no bias \u2014 a good education story is a good education story.\u201d<\/p>\n The post School Privatization Lobby Places Fake News on Local Stations<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With Ed Newsfeed, the Betsy DeVos-funded American Federation for Children distributes syndicated content to TV stations. They run it as news.<\/p>\n The post School Privatization Lobby Places Fake News on Local Stations<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":246,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205469"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205469"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":205894,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205469\/revisions\/205894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Many clips feature schools, programs, and leaders affiliated with the school choice movement.<\/blockquote>\n
![\"ednewsfeed\"](\"https:\/\/prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2021\/06\/ednewsfeed-1024x849.jpg\")
\n“What this is, actually, is propaganda, because these are not news stories.”<\/blockquote>\n